Look! – No WWW on this site. Why?

In order to answer this question, we must first recall the definition of WWW:

World Wide Web:
n. Abbr. WWW

1. The complete set of documents residing on all Internet servers that use the HTTP protocol, accessible to users via a simple point-and-click system.
2. n : a collection of internet sites that offer text and graphics and sound and animation resources through the hypertext transfer protocol.

By default, all popular Web browsers assume the HTTP protocol. In doing so, the software prepends the ‘http://’ onto the requested URL and automatically connect to the HTTP server on port 80. Why then do many servers require their websites to communicate through the www subdomain? Mail servers do not require you to send emails to recipient@mail.domain.com. Likewise, web servers should allow access to their pages though the main domain unless a particular subdomain is required.

Succinctly, use of the www subdomain is redundant and time consuming to communicate. The internet, media, and society are all better off without it.

One other thing, it’s a SEO dirty little secrety, having www and a non.www page splits page rank, either make everything point toward www or remove it using your httaccess and watch your SEO improve.

In today’s internet we are seeing changes in coding styles faster then most people care to keep up with, everying for CSS 3.0 to AJAX interfaces are pushing the envelope on a daily basis. Validation is one of the major casuaties of all this “progress” that is floating around on the net these days. When I set out to make this blog, I wanted to make it 100% HTML Valid, much easier said then done when using a CMS engine to power and organize the actual content. The cooler the design the less likely that my code would validate. I kept with it tho, and religiously would rework pages that didn’t validate and except for maybe a couple minor pages on this blog, mostly it’s 100% valid HTML and CSS. Could it be better, certainly anybody that takes three seconds and looks at my code will snicker.. my CSS is completely unorganized, lackes serious documentation and is bloated and homely.. but there are no validation errors. Why is this so important to me?

1. Search Engines – I do SEO for a living and honestly people it’s just a matter of time before Google and the rest of the search engines start judging sites based on the validity of thier code, it just makes sense. There are a million ways to manipulate SEO optimization, especially if your not following HTML & CSS validation rules, by rewarding well written and coded sites, the SE’s will eventually be able to remove things like text color being set to the same color as the background or fonts being so small they can’t be read.

2. Cross Browser Compliance – It’s about 20000x easier to fix problems when your code doesn’t have any “seroius” flaws to begin with.

3. Faster load times – look if your coding correctly it makes everything easier on everybody. It’s that simple… writing good code won’t slow things down. The less tables, the less fixing a browser has to do, the better. Want a fast site, start with clean valid code. (I’m still working on the clean part.)

4. Geek Factor – Finally the coolest and most important reason, coding valid code is cool, it’s beautiful and it’s poetry. Respect your code, love it.. cherish it, your going to take a lot of time writing and working with it, take time to make it as valid as possible. In the end having the little green checkmark for valid code is a very rewarding feeling.